Searching for the Spirit of the Midwest

If you’ve seriously studied or written about the Midwest in the last, say, decade, you owe something to Jon K. Lauck. Starting in 2013 with The Lost Region—not a history of the region but of its historians—he has tirelessly promoted Midwestern history. Both through an impressive string of books and by helping to found the Midwestern History Association, he has worked to revive and reorganize the study of a region that sometimes forgets it has a history, a culture, or even, famously, an accent. (Pronounce that first syllable through your nose.) Now Lauck has given us the fullest articulation yet of his vision of the Midwest. His new one-volume history, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900, presents the nineteenth-century Midwest as “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen to date.” He argues for the recovery of this history, a story of “democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender progress, and civic energy,” which should be remembered not only for the sake of accuracy but also for “our own wellbeing.”